Rental fraud and property security challenges continue to evolve posing significant challenges for renters and landlords alike. Potential renters face scammers posing as legitimate landlords, using stolen or fake property listings to lure potential renters into sending money or personal information.
Apartment List research has found that 5.2 million renters in the United States have lost money due to rental fraud. These types of scams are increasingly sophisticated, utilizing electronic communication and payment methods to avoid face-to-face interactions and making it harder to identify red flags.
Landlords, owners, and operators are experiencing a rise in both fraudulent applications and trespassers taking over vacant units. These types of scams lead to bad debt financial losses, property vandalism, damages, legal issues, and increased vacancy rates.
Not to worry, there are innovative tech-forward ways to protect your rentals from scams! Rently’s security tactics during self-guided tours and smart home technology are making a difference. Rently’s advanced pattern matching uses historical prospective renter data to detect anomalies and suspicious behavior in real time to proactively identify and block potential scams and social engineering attempts.
During Rently’s secure self-guided tours all prospective renters go through a lead verification process, Verified Renter. Before every self-guided tour, prospective renters must create a Rently account and pass a stringent identity verification process. They have to provide a government issued photo ID, a selfie for facial biometric screening, and get evaluated against several other risk behavior factors from online signals, AI and machine learning.
Many of our clients in fraud-risk areas also incorporate smart home technology to further prevent, detect and monitor their properties. Adding smart locks, security cameras, and remote access can dramatically reduce unauthorized access and increase tenant accountability. With Rently Smart Home products, most activate critical alert notifications to receive instant notifications when a suspicious activity or security breach is detected, so they can take immediate action, which limits property damage.
Many clients also use Fake Listing Monitoring to protect their brand and properties from being impersonated on other listing platforms via duplicate or misleading listings from fake landlord scams.
Now we’re ready to explore how Rently’s security features and smart home solutions are deterring fraud in the real world.
Show me the data! How are Rently Clients Protecting Their Rentals from Scams?
From June 2024 to June 2025, our data reveals some powerful insights about property protection—and the role smart home technology plays in preventing scams and vandalism.
The Numbers at a Glance:
- 1.64 million Self-Guided Tours were completed in the Single Family space.
- Out of those, less than 1%, only 0.58% of tours completed reported potential scam issues or missing keys.
- And only 0.22% of tours completed reported some type of vandalism, damage or potential squatter incident.
With Rently’s secure self-guided touring service combined with advanced security tools and smart home devices, clients are effectively deterring rental fraud.
Comparing Three Enterprise Clients Over a 30-Day Period (May 2025)
We are comparing three clients with similar portfolio sizes—but different levels of smart home device adoption and security features usage during self-guided tours.
Client A: Full Smart Home Adoption & Self-Guided Tour Security Features
- Reported 82% fewer squatter incidents than Clients B and C during a single month.
- Reported 100% fewer missing key incidents than Client C during a single month.
Why? This client has adopted a fully smart-enabled portfolio and actively uses keyless smart locks and all available security features, including account creation security tools, pre-tour security tools and some advanced security tools during all self-guided tours. When the unit is unoccupied, the smart devices monitor signals that detect and monitor the property for risks and automatically sends alert notifications proactively to the property manager, preventing potential issues from happening. Smart locks are used during self-guided tours, so no keys are required to open or close the unit.
Client B: 50% Smart Home Adoption & Minimal Self-Guided Tour Security Features
- Reported 72% fewer vandalism cases than a direct competitor (Client C) who has no smart home integration and minimal security features used during self-guided tours.
Why? This demonstrates that even partial adoption of smart home features significantly reduces risk.
Client C: No Smart Home Adoption & Some Security Features
- Reported missing key incidents were 11 times higher than Client B who uses smart locks which do not require the use of physical keys. Smart locks offer convenience and do prevent the need to have a physical key or lockbox.
- Reported incidents of vandalism at this client’s vacant properties was 3 times higher than Client B.
Why? This client is not using any smart home devices to proactively detect activity signals and no security system or real time monitoring of vacant units. To clarify, the vandalism incidents are being reported by prospective renters upon their arrival to tour their properties. That means, the client is only made aware after the ID-verified prospective renter reports it via the self-guided touring app, and not because of self-guided touring.
How to Protect Your Rentals from Scams
Offering self–guided touring is essential as 83% of prospective renters want to take self-guided tours and 53% prefer to tour outside of regular business hours and weekends. What’s important to remember – is that innovative proptech tools can help you protect your rentals from scams, fraud, and trespassers.
When marketing your vacancies, it’s essential to protect your rental assets effectively. Here’s a few ways to do that:
- Turn on advanced ID-verifications before self-guided tours: Require advanced government-issued ID and selfie checks to screen potential leads more effectively. Always know who is visiting your properties. Rently’s self-guided touring service requires prospects to actually provide their social security number that TransUnion validates and confirms via a soft pull of their credit. They also require correct answers to IDMA (out of wallet) questions. These critical security measures prevent bad actors from entering the platform, as individuals with ill intent are unlikely to present legitimate IDs, allowing fake ones to be identified and blocked.
- Enable pre-tour security tools to help flag risky activity: Rently’ Self-guided touring platform has several unique Scam Prevention Mode features you can enable before prospective renters take self-guided tours: These security tools help flag risky activity in high-risk markets and limit access to ID-verified prospective renters only.
- Add pre-screening questions and scam awareness education: When marketing to prospective renters, it’s important to keep them up to date on the latest rental scams too. During the scheduling of tours ask prospects how they found your property and other pre-screening questions to identify risks before they visit your properties and to educate them on what to look out for to not be scammed.
- Use Fake Listing Monitoring when marketing your properties: Protect your brand and properties from being impersonated by monitoring platforms for duplicate or misleading listings.
- Adopt Smart Home Technology: Add smart locks, security cameras, and remote access to dramatically reduce unauthorized access and increase tenant accountability. These modern amenities are in high demand now, and they also offer ultra-convenience to renters, add security, and eliminate the cost of rekeys and lost keys.
- Activate Critical Alert Notifications: Using smart home devices proactively to know what’s happening at vacant units enables you to get instantly notified when suspicious activity happens or security breach is detected, so you can take immediate action.
At Rently, we understand that ensuring property security is a top priority for operators. Vacant or occupied, a property can be susceptible to various threats, including unauthorized occupancy, vandalism, and rental fraud scams. However, Rently Smart Home and secure Self-Guided Touring all you to more efficiently manage and effectively protect your rentals from scams.
Are you an existing Rently client and interested in adding more security features and smart home devices to your portfolio? Reach out to your Rently Client Success Manager.
Not a current Rently client? To learn how Rently can help your SFR or MF rental business, schedule a demo today!
